


Unheeded Want at Second Breakfast

by ThunderStag



Series: TAZ in LOTR [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: And Barry's a better Necromancer than Sauron, Barry and Lup aren't immune to the Ring they've just got everything they want, For Want Of A Tom Bombadil, Gen, Or at least a cooler one, TAZ Balance, Taako's tacos, Tacos, The Adventure Zone Balance - Freeform, universe hopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:35:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25020226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThunderStag/pseuds/ThunderStag
Summary: If things were slightly different, Frodo and Sam would have run into a mysterious old husband and wife beyond the Ring's power. They still do, it's just a different husband and a different wife.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans/Lup, Frodo Baggins & Sam Gamgee
Series: TAZ in LOTR [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2006140
Comments: 5
Kudos: 50





	Unheeded Want at Second Breakfast

**Author's Note:**

> Lup made those belts to go get her fifteen dollars back, right? This isn't a stretch from that.

Frodo could no longer breathe, trapped beneath the roots of the tree. He could no longer see, nor smell anything but damp earth and leaf mold and panic. The cold of the earth beneath the tree had seeped through his clothes, and it was beginning to fall into his mouth, and all he could hear was his panicked gasping – and then a voice, clear but not loud, saying something above him, too quiet to make out words.

The tree around him flexed, shuddering, and abruptly he was lying on his back in the forest, mud and leaves, and worms, too, covering him from head to toe. Frodo gasped, choking for air and suddenly caring a lot less about dirt in his mouth, and rolled onto his stomach so he could shove himself upright. Beside him, he could see and hear Sam doing the same and having rather a harder go of it, thanks to his heavy pack, when a strong, tanned hand gripped his gardener’s shoulder and helped him upright.

“You two little dudes alright?” a woman’s voice asked, and Frodo looked up to see an Elf of such surpassing beauty that he forgot he was trying to breathe for a moment. She was tall, as Elves tended to be, and slight with it, but her face was tanned as dark as any hearty farmer’s by long days in the sun, and she had a spray of freckles across her skin. Her hair was like straw, lightened by still more sunlight, and her eyes were the color of green leaves, lit by the sun from behind. In all his life, Frodo had never met anyone so touched by sunlight. Despite her slenderness, she bore the strength of long labor, and wore a tunic and greatly abused trousers of dark blue and wine-dark red. Her feet were bare, which Frodo found reassuring; elves seemed to consider shoes rather important, if less so than Men, and rarely touched the earth the way Hobbits did every day.

“Yeah, uh, sorry, that big tree can be a little, uh, touchy,” said another voice, and Frodo staggered around to see a human standing there. He was very little like the Elf, with sturdy blue trousers of a material Frodo did not recognize, a thick leather belt, a white shirt with short sleeves, and a red cloak. He was shorter than the Elf, and his hair was very short, and he wore thick spectacles and had the same air of absent-minded scholarliness as his uncle Bilbo, which was in its own way as reassuring as the Elf’s bare feet.

“Alright!” Sam sputtered, brushing himself off. “Alright! Drawn into the earth by a tree, of all things, and halfway nearly choked to death on grasping roots and dirt and worse! This forest is no place for civilized things, sir!”

“No, yeah, the tree’s kind of a little punk, bud,” the Elf woman said. Now that Frodo could hear her more clearly, she sounded very bright, and more alive and present than the elves he and Sam had seen before. She grinned cheerfully at him, and said, “we could make it up to you, if you like. I always heard Hobbits love a good meal, right?”

“We have far to go,” Frodo said carefully, and did not reach for his uncle’s ring. “We cannot stay in one place for overlong, though I do thank you for your hospitality.”  
“It’s getting dark, bud,” said the Man. “And, uh, I don’t know about you two, but I wouldn’t really want to wander in the, uh, haunted forest full of murder trees for very long, if I were traveling. We have a little house not too far from here, if you want to stop for the night. Y’ don’t have to, I’m just saying.”

Sam looked at Frodo, and Frodo at Sam, and if Sam’s stomach rumbled with a healthy desire for food, then it only covered the sound of Frodo’s doing the same. The Elf laughed, and it was a terribly joyful sound. No servant of an enemy worth fearing, Frodo supposed, could still laugh in such a way as that.

“Our stomachs have given us away!” Frodo said. “We will come with you.”

The walk back to the house the Man had spoken of was very bright and cheerful, though as they had said the sun was beginning to sink and the sky was beginning to grow glorious with its evening colors. The two spoke of themselves freely; she was Lup, an Elf from a place they had not heard of called Faerun, and they were in this forest to learn something of its energies and the way it interacted with life and death – something that Frodo would have found very terrifying indeed, had the Man (who called himself Barry Bluejeans, and who indicated that his surname meant his strange trousers, and who was cheerful and stuttered) not hastened to explain that they weren’t in it to start causing any of those things, they were just ‘in the business’ and interested in how their world worked in that way. Bluejeans continued by explaining that he and Lup were married, which reminded Frodo very vaguely of a song he had heard in passing once upon a time, and that the house they lived in had been built by a carpenter friend of theirs. This made Sam ask them his name, as he knew very many carpenters in the Shire, but when they told him he did not recognize it.

Frodo found himself unexpectedly disappointed that he could not get in contact with Magnus Burnsides himself for work on his own home – should he be able to return there! – when they arrived, for the cottage was of a clearly excellent quality and had been lovingly painted a striking shade of deep, royal blue on the trim and shutters. The windows looked out into a lovely garden that had Sam humming with appreciation, and Frodo admired the carvings on the door, the peaks of the roof, and several other places that alternated between ducks and ravens. Not a common theme, in Frodo’s experience, but he could appreciate the quality of the carvings. Each one, be it a true-to-life statue or a stylized depiction, was rendered with loving care and unmatched skill.

“We’ll have dinner on the table in a jif, boys,” Lup said cheerfully, and tossed her own red cloak on a hook inside the door. “Wipe your feet if you like, and make yourselves comfortable; I think we’ve still got a half a cow downstairs.”

“What’s on the menu, Lup?” Barry asked, as he hung his own cloak more carefully on the hook beside his wife’s.

“Tacos!” she shouted from down the stairs, which she had elected to ignore in favor of bounding fully down the slope to the cellar from the ground floor.  
“Aw, nice,” Barry murmured, and headed into the parlor, where a pair of huge, intricately-carved desks sat. Both desks had incredible scenes carved into their fronts, with trolls and dwarves and men alike battling impossible beasts of writhing shapes while a ship flew overhead. It seemed likely to Frodo that this was a depiction of the War of Wrath, though he did not know enough of that to say which part.

“Excuse me, sir?” said Sam. Barry looked up. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a taa-ko, myself, though I’ve hardly traveled further than a little ways from my own front door. Er, what is it?”

“Oh, a taco’s a – it’s kind of a – you know how an open-faced sandwich isn’t really, technically a sandwich, but there isn’t a word for it because it’s still basically a sandwich?” Sam indicated that he did, though Frodo felt lost. “A taco’s kind of like if you took that idea, but the bread is different, and the sandwich is kinda less layered, but not exactly just a heap of stuff, and – look, it’s good, you know? You’ll see.”

Sam nodded, and leaned towards Frodo. “Mayhap I should take a bite first, when she comes back up,” Sam whispered. “Just in case, Mr. Frodo, you never know with foreign foods.”

“I think any food you risk yourself on, Sam, I’ll risk myself on as well,” Frodo whispered back, and then Lup came clattering up the stairs again with a bowl of meat and a wooden spoon, as well as a cast-iron pan and a handful of jars.

“Oh, Mrs. Bluejeans, let me help you with that!” Sam cried, and hurried to take the bowl and several of the jars.

“Mrs. Bluejeans, huh?” she asked. She glanced at Barry, who grinned back, and laughed. “You can call me Lup, my dude. I don’t think anyone’s ever actually called me Mrs. Bluejeans.”

“Then – then if I’m to call you by your right name, ma’am, then let me help you cook! Nothing so pleases a Hobbit as a well-stocked kitchen, and your’s is as good a one I’ve ever seen!” Lup laughed, and agreed, and went to find a stool for Sam to use, since he was only just able to see over the edge of the counter. In the parlor, Barry shuffled through a handful of papers on one of the desks, then sighed and sat down in a huge and well-worn chair.

“You’ve got something on you there, bud. ‘S dark. I won’t – I don’t think it’s really mine to worry about, but if you, uh, if you need help getting rid of it I might be able to lend a hand,” he said, and Frodo froze.

“I...don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said carefully, but this time he was unable to keep from reaching up to the ring around his neck.

“No, it’s – don’t worry, Frodo, I’m not after it myself. It’s not the kind of thing I, uh, go after, you know? Phylacteries are bad enough where I’m from, I don’t even want to know what happened to make one this old in a place with death rules like, uh, like this.”

“Phy...what?” Frodo asked.

“Phylacteries. You know, the vessel of a portion of one’s power when used specifically as a method of avoiding death? I don’t have one, myself, because the Plane of Magic in the Planar System I figured stuff out in was right on top of me, but, uh, that’s one right there. Or just about one, anyway. Where did you get it? If you don’t mind my asking, I mean.”

Frodo sank into a chair, and though it was too large it was very comfortable. He reached up and carefully removed the Ring, which felt cold and heavy and strange, in this room, but which did nothing else. “It was my uncle’s,” he said, distantly. “He won it from a creature in a game of riddles.”

“That’s, uh, that’s about as embarrassing a way to lose a phylactery as I’ve ever heard, there, bud,” Barry said, and laughed a little. “Hey, are you okay?” 

Frodo heard him like he was speaking from afar and underwater – a distant, tinny, echoey voice. The ring filled his vision, sitting there in his hand, and he could hardly breathe. He felt afraid for the first time of Barry Bluejeans – afraid of what he might do to him, afraid of what Barry might try to take from him, afraid of what Frodo might do if he tried to take the – 

The ring was suddenly no longer in Frodo’s hand, and quite suddenly he could feel himself stumbling, mind coming back into focus. He looked up, his suspicions and fears melting like frost in summer, and saw that Barry was holding the Ring, now. That golden band had felt like nothing so much as the universe itself, in Frodo’s hand; it had been like holding the lives of every living being, and all the stars, and all the power to do whatever he might, in the palm of his hand. Now, it looked like a piece of gold, held between clever fingers of a man who had been nothing but kind to Frodo since they had first met.

“That’s a lot of compulsion, there,” Barry muttered. “Lotta desperation. Lotta will. But it shouldn’t be affecting you like that quite yet – you’ve had this on you for, what, a few weeks? Maybe ten days?”

“A...little less than that, I think. Someone has been looking for it. I had to leave home to keep them from getting it. They want to take it back to its master, and they don’t care who they hurt while they do.”

“Huh. Maybe it’s afraid of you, then, to be pushing so hard.”

“Afraid?” Frodo said, and laughed at the absurdity of it. “Of me? I’m only a little Hobbit! I have it nearly by accident!” It felt good to laugh in that place, after the moment when the Ring had felt like everything in the world.

“Good thing, too,” Barry said, and he suddenly looked as old and as wise as Gandalf. “Things like this don’t like accidents. They love to think they’ve got everything under control, that they have the whole wide world under their clever little thumb. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost; for want of an accident, this thing isn’t at all where it thought it would be right now.” He looked directly at Frodo, and the light from the setting sun flashed on his spectacles, and he looked as inscrutable as a stone wall.

“Dinner’s up, babe!” came Lup’s voice from the other room, and the moment passed. Barry grinned that easy, love-struck grin he got when his wife spoke, and set the ring in Frodo’s hand. 

“Come on, bud,” he said cheerfully. “Taco Tuesday.”

“I think you’re going to like these, Mr. Frodo!” Sam called out. “They’ve got a wonderful tang!”

Frodo stayed where he was for a moment longer, staring at the ring, and closed his eyes. Then he turned and went into the kitchen. He would hate to miss taco Tuesday.

_-0-_

Though most things didn’t change as a result of that moment, a few did. Samwise Gamgee cooked tacos for the Elves of Imladris, and much to his surprise found that it was no Elf delicacy but a new food entirely. Later, inspired by his dish and unaware of how it had come to be known to him and the others, Pippin served the same to Lord Denethor in Minas Tirith, and the maddened Lord of the last great city of Gondor found himself regretting bitterly what he had done to his youngest son – though all that did in the end was to slow his steps on the way to the pyre during the siege of the city.

During the last great battle of the War of the Ring, at the Gates of Mordor, a few additional warriors inserted themselves and, if they did not turn the tide, they certainly saved many lives (for all that their healer did very little healing). In the years following that war, Gandalf sought out that little cottage in the woods near the Shire, and spent several excellent months discussing strange magics and the importance of a good staff with the Bluejeanses and their various guests.

And in his great and terrible tower in Mordor, looking over the flaming crest of Mount Doom, gazing with might and hate upon all that was not yet his, the great eye of Sauron seemed to droop slightly. None heard it save the rats and spiders who dwelt in his dungeons, but a whisper seemed to hiss through the halls of that accursed tower: “I wanted a taco too…”


End file.
